Britney Spears: The downfall of a star

Peter Jackson with his “Rings”!!

At the very least, a transformation of transformations! Can there be anything left to say, to think, or to dream about Gandalf and Frodo, Samwise Gamgee, Merry, Pippin, Aragorn, Legolas, Gollum, Gimli, Boromir and Faramir, Theoden, Eowyn, Arwen, Elrond, and their many advisors, friends, foes, and family who come almost to breathe through the pages of J.R.R. Tolkien’s and Peter Jackson’s trilogies? Or, to put this more sharply: given the plethora of carping and alternately adulatory lay criticism, the bubbling worldwide fan discourse, and the widespread conviction not only that Jackson has accomplished something magnificent and important with his films but also that we already know what that is, have already understood and digested it, is there really anything of substance that can further be said, written, conceived about The Lord of the Rings that is worth reading?

For ardent fans of Tolkien, for ardent followers of Jackson, even for those whose fixation lies upon Elijah Wood or Liv Tyler or Orlando Bloom or Ian McKellen, as well as for those who yearn for a deeper appreciation of cinema and its relation to culture, the essays contained in these pages promise to open a new vista of interrogation and light. That of all directors it should have been Peter Jackson who made these films is by no means obvious, even though he had long been an admirer of Tolkien’s books and had come to regard The Lord of the Rings as “the holy grail of cinema”.

The director of Bad Taste and Braindead, and a boyhood fan of Cooper and Schoedsack’s King Kong (1933) who proceeded to use an 8 mm camera for shooting dinosaurs, Peter Jackson first read the Tolkien books “as a teenage apprentice photo-engraver, and he boldly claims his goal is to make Middle Earth look like it was shot on location”. But before this film, virtually all of his work exploited a comic vision to some degree, and indulged in one or another version of the grotesque; he had established himself as a filmmaker who could be counted on to produce what Barry Grant calls “a deft synthesis of comedy and splatter”.

At the same time, he had a bold ambition, “to compete with Hollywood but with the resources to do so”. His devotion to New Zealand filmmaking, which has led him to shoot all his pictures there and even to form WETA, an indigenous special effects company that rivals George Lucas’s Industrial Light and Magic, is certainly, as Grant suggests, an explicit address to the American domination of cinema; this to such a degree that Jackson, even before The Lord of the Rings, was well on the way to establishing the prowess of New Zealand cinema.

On the other hand, whether with this trilogy, and with King Kong (2005), it is true, as Costa Botes suggests, that Jackson has proven “it is possible for New Zealanders to make ambitious, and thoroughly entertaining genre films for the rest of the world, which aren’t necessarily tainted by commercial compromise”, is perhaps less clear. At this writing, the Rings trilogy has realized some $US 3 billion worldwide; and we cannot overlook the fact that the principal cast was not composed of New Zealanders.

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